A Visit With...

Sowing a Passion for Plants

Dave Graf spent his boyhood summers at his great-grandparents’ farm in Memphis, Indiana, planting tomatoes and milking cows by hand and watching the team of horses work in the fields. His love of the outdoors cultivated in those early days still flourishes.

“My wife and I always have to laugh because I can be outside all day long,” Dave says. “She can stay inside; she has a group she quilts with every Tuesday. She has her thing and I have mine.”

Dave and his wife, Monica, raised their five children in the 1899 farmhouse on the family homestead. Now, three of Dave’s children built homes on the farm, but only one of them is interested in tending the annual garden with him — though the others are content to share the bounty.

Wanting to strengthen his knowledge of all things green and growing, Dave became certified as a Purdue University Extension master gardener in 1999. After retiring from a long career at Clark County REMC, he had time to invest in what he really likes: He built a pole barn with a climate-controlled workshop in which he could dry the flowers and plants he grew on the farm and arrange them into wreaths, flowering baskets and potpourri for friends and family. In his workshop during the autumn hang fragrant boughs of lavender, hydrangeas, larkspur, costmary, zinnias and more.

Dave puts on a CD of World War II-era hits or classic movie musicals and gets to work.

“One other thing that the last couple years I’ve been growing is cotton,” Dave says. “A pod, when it breaks open, I just swap out the cotton and use the pod in the arrangement. Okra, when it gets too big to eat, it’ll dry, and I use that in arrangements too. I don’t like it to eat, so I just grow it for the arrangements.

“I just picked up the arranging on my own. I didn’t have classes or anything. My wife says I can’t pick out the colors of my clothes, but I can pick out beautiful arrangements. We had a granddaughter who got married two years ago, and I made all the table arrangements.”

When he’s not designing bouquets or pulling weeds, Dave stays busy volunteering with his fellows of the county’s Sunnyside Master Gardeners group. He chairs the New Albany and Jeffersonville farmers markets and passes on his knowledge to kids through the Youth Master Gardener program.

He and the other area master gardeners kick off every December by hosting a wreath-making class. “It’s the start of the holidays, and it’s just wonderful to see all the beautiful wreaths that go out,” he says. “The master gardeners cut everything from their landscape and gardens, so they have all kinds of different greenery and holly and dried things, even feathers.”

Dave even enshrined his fondness for flora — and his love for his wife of 55 years — by registering daylilies in both their names with the National Gardening Association. “I got to pick the seedlings,” he says. “Her favorite color is orange, so I tried to give it an orange-colored one for hers.”

Today's Transitions Spring 2024

By Jessica Alyea | Photos by Melissa Donald